George Orwell

I

Introduction

George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), British novelist, essayist, and critic, whose brilliant reporting and political conscience fashioned an impassioned picture of his life and times. A writer of remarkable clarity, Orwell claimed that fine prose should be transparent, “like a window-pane.” In his essays “Shooting an Elephant” and “Politics and the English Language,” he asserted that dishonest politics and slipshod language are inseparably connected evils. His essays provide models of what he preached. Orwell felt impelled to write on political themes to counter the totalitarian tendencies that he felt threatened his age. Such concerns prompted the two satirical novels for which he is best known, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

II

Early Life

Orwell was born in Motihari, India, where his father was a minor official of the customs service in British India. He was educated in England at St. Cyprian’s, the preparatory school he later described as Crossgates in his autobiographical essay “Such, Such Were the Joys.” In 1917 he won a scholarship to Eton College, which he attended until 1921. The consciousness of being a poor boy in a setting where poverty was despised helped make him a youthful radical and iconoclast in his later years at Eton.

From 1922 to 1927 Orwell served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (now Myanmar). This was the period that decisively transformed his outlook. Orwell gradually came to detest his role as a representative of a colonial government and to identify himself with the subject people. In England on leave in 1927 he decided to quit the Imperial Police, to take up writing and to speak out against the domination of any person over another.

III

Early Writings

Orwell’s early books were highly autobiographical. His experiences as a dishwasher in Paris, a hop-picker in rural England, and a tramp in the English countryside provided the material for his first published book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), an account of the sordid conditions of the homeless poor. Burmese Days (1934), an indictment of imperialism, was largely derived from his experiences in Asia. Like the heroine of his novel A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), he had worked as a master in seedy private schools, and like the hero of Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), as a bookseller’s assistant.

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In 1936 the socialist Left Book Club sent Orwell to study how the unemployed were living in the working-class districts of northern England. The immediate result of this journey was his harrowing report on the conditions of unemployed coal miners in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Orwell lived in northern England for over two months, talking to miners, their families, their neighbors, and labor union officials. He went down the mines and endured the same conditions as the miners to see for himself the hardships of a life quite unlike his own. He was appalled by “the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances.”

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Orwell went to Spain as a journalist. But immediately after arriving in Barcelona he joined a militia unit on the Republican (antifascist) side. He was seriously wounded by a sniper and he became involved in fighting in Barcelona between a Marxist militia unit and anarchists on one side and communists on the other side. His personal account of trench fighting, in Homage to Catalonia (1938), forms one of the most moving accounts of this war ever written. The book also exposes Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin’s bid for power in Spain. Orwell’s description of the power struggles in Barcelona offered a glimpse of what was to come in his later work:

IV

Later Writings

Spain gave Orwell a subject for the rest of his life. It revealed to him how far political motives, wrongly applied, can destroy the respect for truth and other decencies prized by the liberal 19th century, whose values Orwell had approvingly characterized in his essay “Charles Dickens.” In Coming Up for Air (1939), his last novel written before World War II, Orwell voiced his concerns about the rise of totalitarianism. Suffering from lung ailments, Orwell was deemed medically unfit to fight in the war. He wrote book reviews, articles, and essays for a number of journals and worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

During the war, Orwell also wrote the witty allegorical fable Animal Farm, a condemnation of totalitarian society based on the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and their betrayal by Stalin. The animals, dissatisfied with their servitude to humans, take over their farm intending to run things fairly. However, they are betrayed by the pigs who adopt the commandment “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The tone is ultimately one of pessimism, suggesting that all revolutions will fail to realize their original ideals because there will always be someone to help the “pigs” gain their evil ends.

Orwell continued his condemnation of totalitarianism in the satirical, futuristic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which presents a terrifying picture of life under the constant surveillance of “Big Brother.” He depicts a totalitarian regime that outlaws truth, love, thought, and the concept of the individual, and controls its populace with fear, brute force, and propaganda. The hero of the novel, Winston Smith, dares to resist and clings to the notion that something of him will survive the terrifying consequences that await him in Room 101 at the hands of the Thought Police: “They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”

The financial security and international recognition Orwell enjoyed from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was short-lived. He died of tuberculosis on January 21, 1950, in London and was buried in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell was published posthumously in four volumes in 1968.